Copies of Britain's News of the World newspaper. / Adrian Dennis, AFP/Getty Images

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

by Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY

LONDON - George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill all are said to have declared the United States and United Kingdom to be two nations divided by a common language. Something similar could be said about their journalism cultures, at least as broadly practiced by the tabloid side of the business.

Verdicts returned in a British court Tuesday clearing ex-tabloid editor and News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks of charges related to phone hacking - but convicting Andy Coulson, also an ex-editor - confirm that.

Britain's now-defunct News of the World newspaper, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, had hired a private investigator to intercept the voice messages of a schoolgirl who had been abducted and murdered by a pedophile.

She was just one of many whose calls were monitored in the frantic attempt to get more sensational exclusives, More than 4,000 people - from London subway bombing victims to gaffe-prone politicians to the royal family - were caught up in the hacking net. All in the service of the story, if not in the service of the reputation of the news business. Murdoch shuttered the News of the World after the scandal exploded in 2011.

It's conceivable that a similar journalistic transgression could occur among the U.S. tabloids, although domestic snooping in the U.S,, as far as we know, seems to be the preserve of the National Security Agency. Yet there are a number of reasons why it is distinctly British in character. That helps explain why a British court just spent the last eight months sorting out the hacking details before clearing Brooks and convicting Coulson.

The most obvious answer is competition. For a small island that can be traversed by car in a single day, there are at least eight dailies that qualify as having national reach and ambition here (leaving aside the issue of the digital world). (The USA, with five times the population, has three, with very different styles.) That makes for a lot of sharp-elbowed journalists chasing the same stories. It has also led to a unique brand of cutthroat news gathering that is exceptionally good at building its subjects up only to knock them down.

There's no delicate way to put this: Journalism as practiced by the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and any of the other British "red tops" is largely an endeavor that thrives on victims, not the mostly inane celebrity gossip that is the bread and butter of the U.S. tabloids, but victims whose only misfortune at times is to be in the public eye.

The hacking trial has made clear that the cutthroat competition here leads to hyper-aggressive techniques prepared to circumvent old-fashioned but respectable shoe-leather reporting.

In an altogether different era, the English journalist Nicholas Tomalin was of the view that the "only qualities essential for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability." That may need updating.

"I've got nothing to be ashamed of - and this goes for everyone on the News of the World - in what we do for a living," Coulson said in an interview to the Press Gazette magazine in 2005. "The readers are the judges, that's the most important thing."

With the case stirring headlines worldwide and frank public discussions about the powers of the U.K. media, the tabloids will tamp down on some of their "extreme" practices, says Katharine Sarikakis, a professor of media governance at the University of Vienna in Austria who has studied the British press.

British tabloid editors underwent a similar period of reckoning following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, she says, but their aggressive, ethically questionable practices eventually reemerged.

"The crisis has been a good thing in the sense it made people ask difficult questions," she says. "But in the long term, I don't think this by itself will change fundamentally what goes on."

Hjelmgaard is USA TODAY's Deputy World Editor based in London. Contributing: Roger Yu